EA Goes Free-To-Play: Battlefield Heroes' Producer Speaks

So, it's interesting --
what I was thinking about is, you talked
during your presentation about shipping with two maps, and that implies
to me that you're planning to upgrade later
-- I mean, obviously, the game is not going to persist on two maps.

BC: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what
we did is, we come to this from two angles. The first one is that in
every Battlefield game, we bust our asses making 50 maps, and
then within six months of the game being released, everyone's playing
two maps. The two best maps. So, we just decided to make just the two
best maps, and not the other kind of maps.

And the other reason is because this
is a service, not a product. We're going to have ongoing support. The
live team for the game are almost as big as the dev team. We want to
have people coming back to the game over time, but we also want the
community to inform us what type of game they want to play.

So we're launching with an infantry-focused
map, and a vehicle-focused map, and if they want to play the infantry-focused
map then we will continue to make infantry-focused maps. And, similarly,
if they think of this as a vehicle-based game, then we'll make the maps
which reinforce that feel. So it's down to the community to define what
type of game this is, really.

It's interesting. Min Kim from Nexon
has said that when they ship a game, it's probably about 50% of the
amount of game that a western publisher might ship, but then they add
to it consistently; is that how you're looking at it?

BC: Absolutely, and I think that's
a really liberating kind of business model, or development model. Usually,
when you're making a western game, you bet all your money on this disc,
and you put it into stores, and you cross your fingers that it's going
to review well and people are going to buy it.

But what we have an opportunity
to do, because it's free, is produce a small amount of content, see
what people like, see what people don't like, and then adapt to people's
tastes.

When it comes to microtransactions,
are you doing them via a card system?
Nexon has Nexon Cash and Habbo Hotel has cards --
you can go to Target, in America, and you can buy them.
EA's Pogo has a system, too, and I'm assuming you're not crossing over
with what Pogo's got in mind.

BC: We're really keen to have any kind
of payment system available, and if you look around the world, there
are different systems -- it might be cards, or PayPal, or credit cards.
It might be on your broadband bill -- that's quite popular in Germany.

Prepaid SMS text messages are really popular in the UK and other parts
of Europe. We just want it to be as easy as possible to fill up their
wallet and get involved in the game that way. So, yeah, we're open to
any type.

I noticed
that when you were demoing the website, it had a section for the player's
region. Is that a payment issue, or is that a gameplay issue?

BC: We need to know where you are so
that we can recognize revenue per territory. That's just to help out
the guys in EA Poland, or whatever. Also, we want to quickly put you
toward servers where you're probably going to have a better ping.

And
the other reason is because we want to localize leader boards. So I'm
not just interested in the fact that I'm 250,000, worldwide; maybe I'm
the number five guy in my town, or maybe I'm the number five guy in
my city.

I'm assuming that this game has
a global market target -- but when we say "global," do we
say global the way we usually mean it when we're talking about an EA
SKU? Which is Western Europe and North America.
Or are we talking about really
global?

BC: I would love it to be really
global, and it's been great meeting the guys from some of the smaller
territories in EA, who are very excited about this game, because they
have a business which is made difficult by piracy -- and, of course,
when you have a free game, there's no piracy problem.

So I'm really
excited to be talking to guys from EA Brazil, in Eastern Europe, in
India, in China, and really, there's no geographical barriers to this
game at all. And I love that idea.